


The Full House

by Canon_Is_Relative



Series: In Spite of All The Danger [5]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Asexual Sherlock, F/M, Infidelity, M/M, Post-Season/Series 01 AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-24
Updated: 2013-12-29
Packaged: 2018-01-05 21:32:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 10,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1098826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Canon_Is_Relative/pseuds/Canon_Is_Relative
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Excerpt from the critically acclaimed book THE EMPTY HOUSE by John H Watson:</p><p>If you were living in London in the spring of 2015 you probably remember hearing about that bizarre night, March 30th, when Ronnie Adair died in the basement of his mother’s house. </p><p>The crime itself was fascinating enough at the time, but for me the thrill of those days lies not in details of the murder but in the events the murder set in motion.</p><p>Ten years later and I can’t think about it with anything less than amazement and utter joy. My friend will laugh at me when he reads this, but it’s nothing he hasn’t already deduced from me: when I think about it, I feel again as though I am in the midst of the greatest miracle of my life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Ten Years Later

**Author's Note:**

  * For [frozen_delight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/frozen_delight/gifts).



> This concludes (for real this time!) In Spite of All The Danger, the series I began in 2011. My mission statement, I believe, has held true over the years:
> 
>  
> 
> _I set out to explore how a romantic relationship between an asexual Sherlock Holmes and heterosexual John Watson might come about and progress. My goal is to stay as true to the portrayal of John and Sherlock in Series One as possible, and I draw heavily from ACD canon._
> 
>  
> 
> This series has been AU since The Great Game. (In mine, the bomb went off.) Of course I wouldn't argue with you if you wanted to go back and read the whole series, but I believe this stands alone as a post-Reichenbach fic of reunion between ace!Sherlock and hetero!Watson who were, regardless of orientation, very much in love prior to Sherlock's disappearance.
> 
> Thanks ever so to Dragonfly for the beta!
> 
> And, finally, this work is dedicated with much love to my dear frozen_delight. This would still be a half-finished draft sitting in my one-day-maybe folder if not for your encouragement and enthusiasm. Merry Christmas, darling!

**If you were living in London in the spring of 2015 you probably remember hearing about that bizarre night, March 30 th, when Ronnie Adair died in the basement of his mother’s house, looking for all the world as though he’d been the victim of Ridley Scott’s chest-bursting Alien. **

**The details of the event became pretty well known over the course of the summer, but as always much was suppressed in the name of putting together a case against the person responsible for the gruesome murder, and in the time since then I have been kept from divulging the more interesting particulars by my most persistent friend who has finally, ten long years later, granted his most kind permission for me to tell you the rest.**

**The crime itself was fascinating enough, but for me the thrill of those days lies not so much in details of the murder but in the events the murder set in motion. Ten years later and I can’t think about it with anything less than amazement and utter joy. My friend will laugh at me when he reads this, but it’s nothing he hasn’t already deduced from me: when I think about it, I feel again as though I am in the midst of the greatest miracle of my life.**

**Sherlock had been gone for nearly three years, but my interest in the sorts of crimes we used to work on together was still strong, and I had been called in more than once already that year to consult with DI Lestrade at the Yard on puzzling medical matters related to his investigations. (Some of you might remember the story about the woman who killed her husband because he hiccupped constantly in his sleep. It was around that time I began to compile material for my book on forensic medicine and crime.) But in this case, despite the fact that Ronnie’s chest seemed to have exploded of its own accord and despite the fact that I had even known him a little, I was not part of the investigation, due to the fact that Lestrade and I were, at first, on the short list of suspects for his murder.**

**Ronnie was well known in certain circles in London, and actually around the world. He had long been known by his Internet handle aDairU2 and made his living playing online poker and Magic: The Gathering. He had written the code for the popular underground game Life in Sixty Seconds, and was just beginning to break into the scene of professional mobile game development. He lived at home with his mother and young sister, occupying a basement flat that he rarely set foot out of, except twice a week - Mondays to play cards at a club called The Full House, and Thursdays to join a team of his fellow hackers for the quiz at the same pub that DI Lestrade and his quiz team, which included me, frequented.**

**On the night in question, Lestrade and I witnessed Ronnie getting so drunk so quickly on drinks stolen from his teammate’s table (he was not much of a drinker himself on normal occasions) that he began to get belligerent, yelling at our team as we began to pull into the lead and, at one of the breaks, throwing a punch at Anderson’s head when our erstwhile scenes of crime officer dared to ask him what had gotten into him.**

**Lestrade’s team at the time were some of the best people I’ve ever met, in any number of ways, and I continue to feel grateful to them for how they took me in, cared for me and carried me through the unbearable days after Sherlock’s death. But the thing you need to know about them is, when it comes down to it, even after several pints and several hours off the clock, they were all such cops that the second Adair lifted his fist to Anderson the holiday mood was gone and Lestrade was escorting him out of the building, trailing the rest of us.**

**It took some doing but we got Ronnie’s address out of him, and I drove him home in Lestrade’s car with the DI sitting in back with him to make sure he didn’t attack me at the wheel. But as soon as we got him into the car the fight seemed to go out of him and he slumped against the window, muttering under his breath.**

**Afterwards we talked it over and Lestrade and I both remember him saying something about “The god damn full house.” I’d spoken to him a few times at quiz nights and I knew that he was a professional poker player, so I didn’t think anything of it. When we stopped outside his home, he got out without our assistance and leaned against the car door. I put down my window and he said, quite clearly, “I’m gonna give it all back, and I’m gonna go to the cops if he don’t do the same. That’s what I’m gonna do, and fuck him, cos I ain’t no cheater. He thinks he can do that to me at my own full house? Bastard.”**

**And that was that. Lestrade and I watched him stumble up to the door, fumble with his key and let himself into the dark house, no one else appearing to be home, and disappear inside. And then I drove Lestrade home, and cabbed it back to Kensington myself.**

**The next morning his death was all over the news, and I was being called in for questioning as one of the last people who had seen Ronald Adair alive. That was all resolved rather quickly - with Lestrade and I for each other’s alibis and no real motive beyond that his team usually beat ours at the quiz, we were never really, I am convinced, in danger of being considered likely suspects. But we _were_ kept away from the case as DI Dimmock was given free reign to trample all over it. My long-term readers will have no problem believing how much it rankled Lestrade to be kept in suspense while the most interesting case of the decade went on around and without him, and I was hardly any more patient.**

**As the facts began to come out - the house locked up from the inside, his own door dead-bolted; the cause of death seeming to be some sort of explosion that had torn open his chest while leaving the rest of his body intact; his computer on the table beside him and, once the code to unlock it was puzzled out, open to a spreadsheet half filled out with the names of his friends from the cards club and various sums of money  - everything built up to a flurry of suspense and anticipation that couldn’t help but draw me in.**

**The day after I was released I went back to work for a few hours to put some paperwork in order, and then I walked through the streets, wandering closer to Ronnie’s neighbourhood as I thought.**

**It was closing in on three years since what I called, in the privacy of my own head, The Fall. I knew that Sherlock was dead, knew it with the kind of desperate certainty one clings to when the hope for something impossible would have made moving on with life just as impossible. But as each anniversary of The Fall approached and passed, I found myself living in a kind of half-dream, half-nightmare daze, reliving our last few weeks together, remembering what I wouldn’t let myself dwell on the rest of the year, sometimes taking out a map and retracing our circular trek through France, Germany, Austria, and finally, fatally, into Switzerland.**

**I hid these reminiscences from Mary, my wife. She had known Sherlock slightly before The Fall. Known him mostly as the man I kept standing her up for. It wasn’t until after I returned from Switzerland that**

 

John steeples his hands with a sigh, gazing out the frostbitten window while a cup of tea cools by his elbow. It’s not until he notices the tea that he realises he’s being observed and, with a laugh, he reaches for it and lifts his eyes to meet Sherlock’s.

 

“Ta,” he murmurs, sipping it although it’s far from hot.

 

Sherlock inclines his head but doesn’t look away. He’s just as sharp and angular as he’s ever been, and he’s never given up his habit of sharp suits at all hours of the day. This particular day it’s before dawn; hours before anyone in their right mind should be in a suit. Gazing at him appreciatively, John tells him so.

 

Sherlock allows a slight smile. “You’d have me in nothing at all, then?”

 

John is well past the time when such an acknowledgment would have him brow-deep in blushes. His quirked eyebrows tell Sherlock all he wants to know, and Sherlock’s faint smile stretches into a grin that reveals the lines in his face; crows feet and frown lines predominate, but around the mouth there are deeply etched marks that speak to a life well lived; caverns in his skin that bear the echo of a thousand remembered laughs and grins.

 

The old familiar tingle starts at the base of John’s skull and he sips his tea calmly. “You’ve been deducing me,” he says, a slight edge of accusation in his voice.

 

Sherlock nods acknowledgment. “Mary?”

 

John ducks his head. “It’s impossible to write any of this without mentioning her.”

 

“And you’re rehashing your old guilt.”

 

“It’d be hard not to.”

 

“Hm.” Sherlock lifts his own cup of tea from its saucer, blows thoughtfully across its murky surface.

 

John runs his hands through his hair, stretching out his back.  _God, I’m tired._  Then he looks up at Sherlock, and makes a deduction of his own. “You've spoken to her recently.”

 

Sherlock nods. “The day I told you to begin work on...all that.” His vague gesture takes in John's computer, the stacks of notebooks and newspaper clippings from the time in question.

 

“And?”

 

“And she’d been about to call anyway, to tell us she’s expecting.” John lifts his eyebrows, and Sherlock concedes, “Her words, not mine.”

 

John hums thoughtfully, looking down into his mug. There'd been a point where he and Mary had talked about – planned for – kids. He knows it bothers Sherlock that, for a moment at least, John had wanted something Sherlock could never give him, so he stays quiet.

 

Sherlock clears his throat and continues. “She wanted me to tell you before you heard it elsewhere and got the wrong idea - her husband being John Winthrop the third they’ve decided to name the child John as well. Apparently it’s important to the family, and of course nothing at all to do with you.”

 

John lets out a quick bark of a laugh, looking up at Sherlock with a grin. “John Morstan-Winthrop. Well.” He shrugs and looks away, his voice going suddenly thin and strained. “I wouldn’t have apologised for naming our first born ‘Sherlock,’ if the cases were reversed.”

 

He turns back finally to see Sherlock gazing at him, inscrutable as ever. John lets the moment hang for a moment before shrugging again and returning to his computer. “Glad it never came to that.”

 

Sherlock doesn’t move, although he refrains from further comment. John pretends to keep on writing, not altogether sure that Sherlock is convinced by the charade as he scrolls through Facebook, replies to emails and comments on the blog, all of this a mindless attempt to keep his fingers moving until Sherlock goes out for the morning. He has a hard enough time recounting the past to himself, let alone typing it out for an audience with the world’s only consulting detective hanging over his shoulder.

 

Sherlock senses this all, of course he does, and as soon as the sun is fully up Sherlock is shrugging into his coat and scarf - and, despite John’s protests and the fact that it’s snowing and freezing cold outside, leaving his hat behind - and slipping out the door, trailing a hand across John’s shoulders as he goes. John returns to his struggle to turn his memories into something marketable, thinking that Sherlock has never talked to him about that day he came back. He has no doubt that Sherlock recalls it perfectly, but he wonders what…if…he chooses to remember.


	2. Sherlock Remembers - Ten Years Ago

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock remembers every moment of the day he returned to John

Sherlock remembers.

 

John still had his elbows braced on his knees, his hands dangling down between, looking at Sherlock with an enormous grin on his face, eyes shining as he stared, not daring to blink lest the illusion fade. Their eyes locked, sealing the bond between them, smoothing over the broken, jagged edges one bad day and three long years had left between them. And they knew - they both knew, with the weight of gravity and the certainty of nightfall - that only death,  _real_  death, this time, would ever crack them apart again.

 

“Sherlock,” John murmured, his voice an awed almost-giggle, “I mean, my God, really,  _Sherlock!_ ”

 

Sherlock’s eyes crinkled at the corners, absurdly pleased by the sound of his name in John’s voice. Revelling in these long-denied auditory pleasures, he was not so lost that he did not hear the quick step on the landing, or the key in the lock.

 

“Hello, darli - Oh. My God.”

 

John stumbled to his feet. Sherlock remained in his chair, fingertips pressed together, eyes lifted now to Mary’s shocked and bloodless face. She pressed quivering fingers to her mouth. Her nails were painted sky blue. Her unassuming ring caught the light.

 

John went to her, taking her elbow and attempting to explain - interrupting half his words and garbling the rest - that it was all right, that Sherlock was back, was alive, had been in hiding all these years to protect himself - and them. Mary clutched at John’s hand but said nothing as Sherlock rose in one fluid motion, pent-up energy keeping him rolling on the balls of his feet so that he seemed to float over to her. He offered his hand and she took it automatically.

 

Sherlock’s lips settled into a thin line as his eyes flicked over her, holding tight to cold dispassion. New haircut. Hangnail chewed at, irritated by fresh nail polish. Thread of her trouser pocket frayed loose and picked at. Her habits spoke of recent hard work, long nights, and long awaited satisfaction. Another good deal, then. Hard earned success.

 

“Mrs Watson,” Sherlock murmured, and colour returned to her cheeks in a rush.

 

John’s hard swallow was audible throughout the small room, and Mary raised her hand to rest against Sherlock’s cheek. “So you’re alive,” she said just as John asked, “You heard about that, then?”

 

“I am, yes,” Sherlock answered her. Then, to John, “And yes, I did. You didn’t think I’d let a little thing like my own death prevent me from keeping up with the lives of my friends, did you?”

 

Mary pulled herself away from Sherlock, reaching instinctively for John. “He’s back,” she said quietly. “Does that mean you…?” She trailed off, her question unvoiced and, to Sherlock’s unending dismay, unknowable. He didn’t know her. But he did know John.

 

John grimaced and shook his head minutely, such an old, dear gesture that Sherlock broke into a huge grin to keep from succumbing - purely out of scientific interest - to the sudden urge to break down into sobs. Interesting, what living alone for so long had done to him; namely given him the space and freedom to indulge in impulses like this without the hassle or embarrassment of an audience. But instead, he clapped his hands and rocked back on his heels and began talking in a rush about the plan he’d put in place, and how they had to get a move on if they were to catch the last of his enemies at his own tricks before the night was out.


	3. The Old Guilt

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John struggles with what to put in and what to leave out of his account of the Adventure of the Full House.

**I reconnected with Mary, who I’d met on one of Sherlock’s cases and gone out with a few times, almost at once after my return from Switzerland.**

**She’d been one of the few people to notice my absence when I disappeared suddenly with Sherlock all those months previous, and when I returned feeling shocked, empty and heartbroken, her familiar face, her kindness and the way she doesn’t shy away from pain or from difficult subjects were all blessings I don’t know that I would have survived without. She was, and still is, a senior editor with Signe & Fore, and one of the best people I’ve ever met. **

**If you’d asked me in those first weeks after Sherlock fell whether I’d ever be ready or willing to commit myself to another relationship, the answer would have been an unequivocal no. But sometime in that first year, Mary and I insinuated our way into each other’s lives, and it seemed like no time at all before we were speaking freely of neighborhoods, and then of rings and dates and invitations. By then the pain of Sherlock’s loss had dulled to the point where if I didn’t speak of it, I could manage it. I spent time with Lestrade as a way to stay connected to the world of the Met and to keep alive a shadow of the feeling I’d had when I was at the height of things with Sherlock - a feeling that I was connected to the world, that I was making a difference. That I was alive. I was alive, and Sherlock was not, and it was supremely unfair and the last thing I wanted to speak openly about to anybody, least of all Mary, who was so brilliant, so lovely, so interesting and so fond of me.**

**But even as I was tumbling head over heels in love with her, I also ached for my old partner and felt myself to be torn between two worlds. His loss to the city of London, to the world, was palpable. I tried to use his methods of deduction when helping Lestrade with cases, but of course there was no substitute for the real thing. As I walked through Ronnie’s neighbourhood that day after his death, I occupied myself with the depressing and pointless calculation of how many lives Sherlock might have saved in the three years he’d been gone. Of course that came up against an unknowable number of lives that Moriarty might have destroyed, if Sherlock hadn’t sacrificed himself to take out the criminal mastermind once and for all.**

**I was spinning my wheels in this rut when I realised I’d stopped outside Ronnie’s house and was staring blankly into the doorway where I’d last seen him disappear. There was a small crowd milling about, a reporter standing on the steps and a few curious onlookers. Among them I thought I recognised one of the guys from the pub who’d been showing up to play on Ronnie’s team for the past month or so, and I nodded to him but didn’t think he saw me. He was staring instead at a dirtyish old man with a scraggly beard and a push-cart full of sleek-looking boxes partially covered by an old blanket. I turned to look back for Ronnie’s mate but he was gone, and I nearly stumbled as someone knocked into me from behind and I, in turn, nearly knocked over the old man.**

**I apologised to him and knelt to pick up the two boxes I’d dislodged - one was the new iPad that wasn’t yet in stores, the other I recognised as the very expensive phone my wife had been coveting since it was released a few weeks prior, both in their factory wrappings. I remember being unduly amused by the tableau before me and as I handed them back to him I tried to get a better look at his face. But the old peddler seemed savagely angry with me and only snarled as he turned tail and fled, his old cart squealing madly away down the road. I supposed that, with all the police presence on the street, he was right to not want to draw attention to himself and his undoubtedly stolen merchandise.**

**My mood lifting for no particular reason, I set off, hoping to catch the end of the match before Mary came home.**

**Back at my house, I fit the key into the lock with no idea that the world was about to change around me once more. With no sign of either my wife or a forced entry, the dirty old man was waiting for me inside my living room, holding out for my consideration the packaged phone that Mary wanted, and apologising for his earlier rudeness. Well, I turned to reach for whatever I could find that could be used for a weapon, calling out for Mary and hoping against hope either that she had let him in herself and gone to make a cup of tea, or that she was safely away at work as she ought to be rather than lying dead in the next room, bludgeoned with a bootlegged iPad.**

**When I turned back to the old man with the fireplace poker in my hand, the ratty old hair and beard were on the floor beside him and he was shrugging out of the fraying topcoat. From beneath a fall of his own, dark hair, his eyes blazed at me. With the clarity of a first responder at the scene of a collision or explosion, I noticed that his hands were shaking. And then with the sound of a waterfall pounding in my ears, everything slipped sideways, just as it had on that morning three years before, and the next thing I knew I was lying on my own carpet with my head in Sherlock Holmes’s lap.**

 

\---

 

… _and the next thing I knew I was lying on my own carpet with my head in Sherlock’s lap._

 

He wrote those words at 9:00. It’s getting on towards noon, now, and though his fingers have strayed back towards the keyboard several times, he hasn’t added to them.

 

Finally, he scrubs his hands through his hair and pushes himself away from his desk, pacing in restless agitation to the window. It’s stifling in the flat and he pushes up on the sash, raising the window a few inches and letting the brisk winter air trickle in to stir the too-long-undisturbed air within. He leans against the wall and looks down on the snowy street, listening as the merry sound of Christmas music trickles out from the half-dozen storefronts below.

 

The thing is, he tells himself, he’s already written this exposé a dozen times in his head. But now that it's come to making it public? He doesn't have a clue what to say.

 

They made a good run of it, he and Mary. and Sherlock. That’s what he needs to say. But how to say that – and why? What right does anyone have to the knowledge of what the three of them went through after Sherlock’s return. Yeah, okay, they all live public lives, and it’s never been exactly secret that John left his wife for his old partner.

 

“The old guilt,” Sherlock calls it. _The old shame,_ rather. _The old impossible situation_.

 

They’d stayed together four years after Sherlock’s return, he and Mary. He told her everything, after the Adair case wrapped. Hashing out all the old pain, all the half-coherent things he’d told her when they first found their way back to each other, much of which she’d already reckoned out. That he had, somehow, been in love with Sherlock. That he’d chosen him, time and again, right up until that choice was taken away from him.

 

That was what she’d already known; but he also told her the rest. The ugly and painful things he’d kept from her, kept locked away, secrets like lead weights in his chest pressing against his heart for three long years. He told her how he’d fetishised what he’d had with Sherlock, elevating their strange and impossible partnership to such a height that he felt like nothing merely human could compare. The too-complicated paths they took to accomodate their different desires - the fact that, in the end, he _had_ desired Sherlock - and the way he'd used Sherlock, the way Sherlock had used him; how he’d come to doubt even his own memory, wondering how much of what he remembered and wrote down were the desperate fantasies of a man who’d been so alone for so long that he deified the first person to make him feel alive again.

 

However, those fantasies were the bread and butter to his table. When Sherlock returned they’d been about to publish John’s first book about his life and crimes with Sherlock Holmes, and saw no reason to postpone the release date. And so, with some updated data and a new epilogue, they’d gone ahead with it. Signe & Fore carried a lot of weight in the modern bookselling market and it had been an instant bestseller. Following in the wake of his scientific flop on forensic medicine and crime, having a steady market and income had come as a relief and vindication for his long hours of work. And Mary, who he’d only met because Sherlock had been called in to consult on the mysterious disappearance of her boss ( _Six Pearls None the Richer_ , John called that story), had reaped the professional fruits as well.

 

The Baker Street flat is so unchanged after all these years it is by turns comforting and disorienting. Resting his forehead against the icy windowpane, John wonders once again how things would be different if Sherlock had left him there after the accident that made him decide, finally, to go after Moriarty. John had been out on a date with Mary, actually, when one of Moriarty's agents, targetting Sherlock, had landed John in the A&E. It was for John's sake that Sherlock had decided when and where to take his stand against the maniac, but John wonders how things would be, how he would feel, if Sherlock had decided to take it alone, had not grabbed him for their long holiday from reality that ended so abruptly in Switzerland.

 

Those three months they’d spent together had been the best of John’s life. They’d seen more places than John had ever expected to visit in his lifetime, had more close calls and more ecstatic escapes than in the past several years together in London, and John had succumbed to the fall with so little resistance he’d hardly noticed it happening until he was so far gone it was impossible to climb back out. At the height of things with Mary he’d felt the same giddy sensation of waking from a dream of falling only to find he was actually flying. The feeling of being in love was so indescribable and so inescapable that, between Sherlock and Mary, John had had moments of hardly knowing who he was anymore.

 

From that first day of Sherlock’s return, there are two conversations that John remembers nearly word for word. He plays them over and over in his head, asking himself the same question he’d asked Sherlock then.  _What were we really talking about?_

 

Sherlock had just laid out his plan to catch Moran, and John was trying to tell him that he couldn’t possibly just run off with him after a bomber at a moment’s notice, for Chrissake. Mary caught his face in her hands, making him look at her.

 

“Look, John, shut up for a minute.” He did. “You and I wouldn’t even have met if you and he didn’t do what you do."

 

She laid her hand on his chest, over his heart, and spoke softly, her voice strained. “I love the man I met that day who was still high off the thrill of chasing down a terrorist on the London Eye. A lot has changed, obviously, and don’t think for a second that we’re not going to talk about it. But you are going mad, without all that. You’re driving _me_ mad. And right now, in this moment, if you don’t go with Sherlock, you are going to regret it, and you’re going to resent it. And me.”

 

She looked at Sherlock, and he looked back at her, unflinching but guarded. “Make sure nothing happens to him, yeah?” She asked, and he nodded. She kissed John then, slow and lingering, and though she closed her eyes he saw the tears gathering there. He hugged her fiercely, and she let him go.

 

And then that night, sitting in the police car after the case wrapped, waiting for Lestrade to join them, Sherlock had asked, “Do you remember the fight we had, shortly before we left London?”

 

John smiled. “We had a lot of fights back then, Sherlock.”

 

Sherlock lifted an eyebrow, conceding the point and clarifying, “The night we met Mary.”

 

John grimaced and looked down at his hands. “What about it.”

 

“I told you that I wanted you to want me. No one else, just me, forever.”

 

“Yeah. I remember.”

 

“I was gone a long time.”

 

John had to look up then, anger and the old pain vying for dominance in the place in his chest that had been hollow for so long he'd forgotten how much the pounding of his own heart could _hurt._ But he didn’t have anything to say to that so he stayed quiet, waiting.

 

“I really thought that I was going to die, John. That’s what I need you to understand. I didn’t leave you behind so that I could carry on fighting alone, I left you because I thought that if I did, no matter the outcome, you would be safe. I didn’t plan for things to transpire as they did.”

 

John glared at him. “Well I’m bloody glad they did. What are you saying, that you wish you’d stayed dead so you wouldn’t have to deal with coming back to find me married to someone else?”

 

Sherlock gave  a minute shake of his head. “I’m trying to say…John, I’m trying to tell you that it’s all right. It’s  _all_  fine. I left. You moved on. You have found someone else to be happy with. And that…I am glad. Before, when I - I was untenably selfish--”

 

John shook his head sharply, reaching out for Sherlock. Not for his hand, as he might have before, just wrapping his fingers around Sherlock’s bony wrist, holding him tight but awkwardly unwilling to pull him close. “What I remember about that night is realising how hard I would fight for you, and to make _it_ , whatever that _it_ was that we had...to make it work.”

 

“Yes,” Sherlock said on a low rumble, looking down to consider the ghostly patterns of shadow the twirling police lights cast over their hands. “And you asked me to trust that you weren’t ‘going anywhere’.”

 

John shook his head again, slow and sad, then shrugged helplessly. He looked up to find Sherlock’s dissecting gaze pinning him to the spot. He let out a breath in a rush and said, “What are we talking about, Sherlock?”

 

Sherlock gently freed himself from John’s grasp, lifting his hand to run the tips of his fingers down John’s jawline. John’s breath caught painfully in his throat and he heard the quiet hitch of Sherlock’s breath echo his own. Heat rose to his face and he closed his eyes, leaning into Sherlock’s touch. Sherlock ducked his head and pressed closer to John, kissing his forehead. Against his warm skin, Sherlock breathed, “We’re talking about me rescinding my claim to you. And I’m telling you _I’m_ not going anywhere.”

 

And he hadn’t. Neither of them had. And it was good. John went back to accompanying Sherlock on cases when he could, and Mary got on with Sherlock as well as anyone ever got on with the idiot. Sherlock spent nearly as much time at their home in Kensington as he did at Baker Street, and when Mary was out of town on business, which was often, and if John wasn’t busy in surgery, all of his time belonged to Sherlock. His return, even part-time, to the excitement of the life he’d known with Sherlock, made him happier than he’d been in years. And up until the morning, years later, when John woke in Sherlock’s bed, tangled in the sheets and evidence of the previous night’s transgressions, he’d thought it was enough. As he’d told Sherlock all those years ago, wanting to change can be enough. But that morning, he realized he didn’t even want to change. He couldn’t stop loving or wanting Sherlock.

 

John had been alive long enough that he’d made plenty of mistakes. That time, when he betrayed Mary’s trust, was one of the worst. The best comparison he can find (although they are so different that admitting he feels similarly towards them would be more shameful than he can bear as one involves the needless, irreversible death of an innocent) is the time near the beginning of his association with Sherlock when he abandoned the girl they’d come to save, Soo Lin Yao, to run after Sherlock, and, defenseless and alone, she’d been killed. He’d known better, he’d owed and promised her better, but he did it anyway.

 

Things like that, decisions like that, were why Mary had asked him, over and over, if this was really what he wanted - if  _she_  was. She’d given him every out, after Sherlock returned, and he’d kept on promising her everything. Why? Well. He has no better answer than they’d been married less than six months and everything was still new and very, very good.

 

He loved her.

 

But he loved Sherlock, she’d say.

 

 _Loved_ , he’d respond, emphasising the past-tense.

 

He would not deny the past, not that he could, but he’d thought he could shape the future by force of will alone. After all what was he supposed to do? He had no model for this. No book or TV show that he’d ever seen had provided him with a template for how an honourable man was supposed to conduct himself when the person he had loved returned from the dead…after he’d committed himself to someone else.

 

 _Honourable man_. He laughs at the thought, and is surprised by how bitter the words taste when he says them aloud.

 

He wonders, suddenly, if what Mary had told him was true. If he could have had them both. She was sitting on their bed, watching him pack his things to leave, after the anger had burned itself out over hours of shouting and crying, leaving both of them weary, numb, and impossibly sad.

 

“I believed you,” she said, responding to John’s hours-ago plea for her to believe that he’d not been lying when he said he wanted her, that he loved her. “I still believe you. But that's not enough. You and me in Kensington, that's not enough for you. And the thing is John, you could have had everything you wanted, you could have had us both. If you would have just stopped lying. That’s what’s wrong.” He went to sit by her on the bed, leaning against her shoulder. She carded her fingers gently through his hair. Even then, the tenderness between them was so palpable it made his eyes burn anew and he closed them, unwilling to start crying again when he’d finally gotten himself under control. Her voice was thick but steady and she told him, “I don’t think I would have minded sharing you with Sherlock, from the beginning. I was kind of used to it, even when he was dead. But you promised me, John…knowing full well that lying, broken promises, is my line in the sand. You broke a promise I didn’t even ask you to make and I’m done, I have to be.”

 

John feels sudden, sharp pain and realises he’s clenching his jaw, biting the inside of his cheek. Taking slow, steady breaths, the way his therapist had taught him back when the worst pain in his life was the phantom agony in his leg, he brings himself back to the present, feeling lightheaded and bewildered by the course of his own thoughts.

 

He pulls out his phone again to check for messages, distractions, anything. As much as he’d wanted Sherlock to leave earlier, he can’t stand being alone now as he struggles with this.

 

So he texts,  _I don’t know what I should put in._

 

The answer comes back quicker than he expects.  _Oh for god’s sake, John. Stick to the facts._

_That you’re a bastard and I’m a cheater?_

_All right then, the selective facts. No one wants to hear about that._

 

And the thing was, as he’d told his blog readership years ago when he first made public (some of) the details of Sherlock’s return, in the time he was gone Sherlock had begun to make something of a new life for himself. He’d been working under the name Sigerson and actually had a house in Norway. That was good – maybe he should start the story with that. Talk about how Sherlock had been prepared to leave his old life behind because it was necessary.

 

Because those whom Sherlock was trying to protect had moved on with their lives. Because he, John, had found someone new to be happy with, and Sherlock respected that and was moving on himself. Until Moran chose to strike so close to home, so close to  _John,_  and Sherlock had no choice but to come back.

 

That seemed to be the way of it, with them. The choices they made defined them, up to and including the moment choice was taken away.


	4. The Adventure of the Full House

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The conclusion to the Full House case, and Sherlock's return to life.

**And then with the sound of a waterfall pounding in my ears, everything slipped sideways, just as it had on that morning three years ago, and the next thing I knew I was lying on my own carpet with my head in Sherlock Holmes’s lap.**

**As I began to recover, he told me everything.**

**Sherlock Holmes had spent the last three years of his life pretending to be dead, and in that time had taken down much of a criminal ring that, unbeknownst to most, operated on all seven continents and in most major cities - and many minor ones as well. Over the course of his career prior to The Fall, Sherlock had come up against many of the players in this game. He told me that he had been aware for some time of a deep organising power behind the crimes, both petty and masterful, that the city brought to his door. He put it this way: “It was as though some diabolical force was shielding the criminals, More than shielding - coaching. Ringleading.”**

**My devoted readers know this diabolical force by the name of Moriarty. You know him as the genius, the mastermind, behind the crimes that kept Sherlock so occupied solving his puzzles before we nearly caught our deaths from the explosion in the pool where Carl Powers drowned nearly forty years ago.**

**What Sherlock discovered while he was away was that Moriarty’s crime network was mostly comprised of men and women acting independently who were easily taken down once the master was dead. But more to the point, it also included another genius by the name of Sebastian Moran. I’d had a taste of his work already; the explosive vest strapped to me that day I was kidnapped. When Sherlock shot it, it went off with much more force than the maker anticipated; had it performed its job as intended, the bombs would have gone off directly over my vital organs, killing me instantly without endangering anyone else in the vicinity or causing a mess that could not easily have been cleaned up. This Moran, I cannot emphasise enough, was incredibly smart and impossibly clever, a genius in his line of work. And he was as devoted to Moriarty, in his way, as I was devoted to Sherlock Holmes.**

**Small wonder, then, that it took the better part of three years for Sherlock to track him down. And even then, he was not able to corner him. Knowing that Sherlock was on to him, Moran was able to stay just ahead of him for years. At first my friend thought that escape and survival were his only objects, but it turned out that he was simply biding his time, setting the stage for a battle he thought he would have a better chance of winning.**

**And so, life went on. At home, I was moving on with mine and, abroad, so was Sherlock. With only Moran still at large, and reason enough to stay away from London, Sherlock had begun to make something of a new life for himself. He’d been working under the name Sigerson and actually had a house in Norway. And so we might both have gone on, if Moran hadn’t chosen to strike so close to home, so close to _me,_  that Sherlock had to come back.**

**The facts were these: Having lost track of Sherlock, but knowing that he would come after him eventually, Moran chose to make his stand on our home ground. He staked me out, assuming that if Sherlock had returned to London, eventually he would contact me. At the time, my life varied very little from its ordinary routine; I had gone into private practice, and I spent most evenings quietly at home with my wife or a few friends except for Thursdays when I joined Lestrade’s team for the pub quiz.**

**While watching me, Moran ingratiated himself with the other group that regularly showed up for the quiz, which of course was Ronnie Adair’s team. After awhile, he also began playing cards with Ronnie at his gaming club, The Full House. It turns out that Moran is a bit of a gambler, making that yet another thing the two of us had in common, and in idle moments I’ve sometimes wondered if Moran and Moriarty had an arrangement like Sherlock and I did whereby Moriarty would keep Moran’s wallet locked up in his desk drawer to protect their rent payments.**

**Yes; it’s been ten years since all this happened, and in that time I’ve learnt to laugh at it, laugh at us, but at the time there was very little humour in the situation. It continued like this:**

**Adair quickly learnt that Moran had been cheating in their poker games at the Full House, and confronted him about it. This annoyed Moran, to have this Young Nobody, as he called him, on his case about cheating at low-stakes club. More to the point, if Adair exposed him to the authorities, his false persona would not hold up to any serious investigation, and he knew that there was one DI in the force, at least, who was on the lookout for him. In short, the whole situation gave him the opportunity to draw Sherlock out at last.**

**Knowing** **both that I would be interested, as it was the kind of odd case I was** **known** **for consulting on not to mention I was acquainted with the victim, and that Sherlock would recognize it for his work and know that if he had struck down Adair he could just as easily come for me next, Moran killed poor Ronnie in his signature style. The night he died, when Lestrade and I drove him home, what made Ronnie so upset was that Moran had showed up to play the quiz and Ronnie had argued with him, saying that Moran couldn’t play with them as he was a cheater, and Ronnie was going to rat him out the next day as well as give back all the money he’d won partnering Moran in their games.**

**Moran had put his arm around Ronnie, as though trying to reason with him, tell him they could work it out, and slipped one of his microbombs into the breast pocket of Ronnie’s shirt. Then he’d followed us as we took Ron home, and waited until we were away. Moran had a sick fetish for watching his victims die, and so he snuck up to the well window that looked down into Ronnie’s basement flat, got his attention, and activated the bomb. As it makes nearly no noise, and no one else was home, his body wasn’t discovered until the next day. The lack of forced entry, the high tech security system and doors locked from the inside were what caught the attention of the press. The signature style of the microbomb and no witnesses caught the attention of my friend. And two days later, Sherlock was back in London.**

**Sherlock knew he had been seen and was being followed when we crossed paths outside Ronnie’s house, which was why he brushed past me so rudely. He wanted to get away, to lose Moran in the crowd, to set him up for the trap he intended to spring. And for that, he needed Moran to follow me, not him.**

**Sherlock swears he told me all of this as I was recovering from the shock of seeing him alive, unharmed, and unexpected in my own living room. Then Mary came home and I am assured that parts of it were retold for her benefit, but I must have heard none of it. By then the afternoon was slipping away and he was jumping up, rubbing his hands together as though eager to be on the move again. I got up and stood in front of him, telling him in no uncertain terms that if he ever disappeared like that again, I would personally put him into the grave that had stood empty in St Mary’s churchyard these last three years.**

**I remember Sherlock looking slightly stunned, as though he hadn’t expected me to react with anger as well as relief. He glanced nervously from me to my wife, and Mary, standing as well and coming slowly over to us, said, “He missed you, Sherlock, he's been mourning for you. And now, to know that you were alive all this time and didn’t trust him enough to tell him, that hurts almost as much as losing you did.”**

**She put her hand on my arm and I squeezed it, grateful that I hadn’t had to say it. He needed to hear it, but where Sherlock was concerned, my diffidence often outweighed my courage, and Mary knew this.**

**“I am sorry,” he said finally, speaking to both of us. “I did not intend to cause you any pain. But!” and he was grinning and clapping his hands again, rocking back on his heels. “Work is the best antidote to sorrow, my dear Mr and Mrs Watson, and there is so much work to be done tonight that, if you don’t bungle it somehow or other, it will justify all your useless puttering about on the planet.”**

**He proceeded to tell us about his plan, which seemed simple enough. Dangerous, yes, but simple. I objected to it, but Mary talked me into going with him. Ridding the world of Moran’s machinations seemed to be the only way Sherlock could have a normal, safe life again, and Mary seemed to think that I needed him (and the mad, harebrained thrills that life with him entailed) to stay sane. So, we began.**

**After some surreptitious spying out our own windows, I rushed out the front door, coat half buttoned, talking excitedly (and quite loudly enough to be overheard by the skulking, hooded figure I saw from the corner of my eye) to the dial tone on my mobile. “Detective Inspector Lestrade, please. … Lestrade, is that you? It's John. My god, Greg, you won’t believe what’s happened. No, it’s really important, listen. I need you to meet me somewhere in half an hour. Can you? Yes, it’s a club called The Full House, on — yes, exactly, where the victim played cards. No, no backup, it’s not like that, it’s just…you’ll see when we get there.”**

**As I was doing that, my wife and another young woman were slipping out the back of our house and hailing a cab to Scotland Yard. Once in the cab, I’m told the other complained relentlessly about how tight the dress was, how uncomfortable the hose and heels were. Mary put up with the whinging and loosed the plait that refused to stay neatly put in her companion’s wild black curls. Mary got out to stay safely at NSY and Sherlock was joined in the cab by DI Lestrade, who, I am told, had a few choice comments to make about Sherlock’s plan to involve the Yard in such a wild scheme, as well as his choice of outfit. It is my secret belief that there may have been hugging involved, but neither party has confirmed this to me. At what point he redonned his famous coat, I am also unsure.**

**Half an hour later I got out of my own cab a block or so from The Full House. I’d just received the coded text that told me all troops were in position, and I couldn’t make up my mind whether I should hurry, lest I miss the action, or drag my feet and hope that it would be all over before I got there.**

**It’s a strange thing, to feel so guided by love of another person that you have trouble puzzling out your own natural inclinations. When it was just me and Sherlock, all I wanted was to be in the thick of things, for how better to keep control of the situation and be there for him if he needed me. I felt that old impulse then, as the need for speed and hurry and vigilance tried to override my natural caution. I hadn’t felt it in years, and it was both thrilling and nauseating. That was when I realised I hadn’t even brought my gun.**

**I turned to look over my shoulder, as though I ought to flag down my cab again and run back home for it, and saw a man coming up to me along the pavement. His head was down but I recognised him as one of Ronnie’s fellow quiz mates – the man I’d seen outside his house earlier in the day. He looked up and me and I nodded. He acted surprised to see me, and for lack of anything else to say, I asked him if he was a regular at the Full House as well as our usual pub, and he nodded. We fell into step together, and he said, “So I guess you’ve heard about Ronnie, then.” I told him I had and we agreed that it was a tragedy.**

**My mind was racing, trying to come up with an excuse to stop him from coming into the club with me - the last thing we wanted was to have a civilian underfoot while we made the arrest. I’d checked the club's opening hours online, they weren’t due to open until later in the evening although the owner, Sherlock had assured me, would be there straightening up and preparing for business, and would let us in. As we paused on the landing of the storefront the thought crossed my mind that maybe he was owner, and I was about to ask him when he grabbed me tight in a businesslike chokehold, kicked open the door and hustled us both inside.**

**It had happened before, and it’s happened again, but still - there’s nothing you can really do to prepare yourself to face down the barrel of a gun. It's a little better when the hand holding the gun is friendly, but still, nearly conking my nose on the end of Lestrade’s pistol wasn’t quite the entrance I’d had in mind.**

**“Let him go, Moran,” Lestrade growled, shifting his position so his gun was levelled straight at the man’s head. “Hullo, John,” he added almost as an afterthought.**

**“Greg,” I nodded, slipping out of the man’s arms and stepping quickly out of his reach, turning around to face him. Ronnie’s quiz mate. Sebastian Moran. Of course. Everything that Sherlock had told me that afternoon surfaced in a rush. Instead of admitting to my momentary bout of spectacular ignorance, I said to Lestrade, “Here he is. Packaged up nicely for you, eh?”**

**I heard Sherlock snort in derision, not fooled for a second. And then he stepped out of the shadows, facing Moran down as Lestrade’s team moved in to secure the bomber. They stared at each other, both giving the impression of being wild, feral animals; Sherlock a tiger waiting to pounce, Moran a trapped bear needing only space and sufficient agitation to destroy us all.**

**“You asshole,” Moran finally spat, swelling with indignation as though he and Sherlock had been trading silent insults all this time. “You utter, heartless bastard.”**

**Sherlock only lifted a dark brow, but his whole countenance seemed to shift, to brighten. I would have said he was grinning if my memory didn’t show me plainly that he was glaring seriously at Moran. “Well, Sebastian. Journeys end in lovers meeting, as they say.”**

**Moran’s lip curled, and suddenly it was he who was grinning. Laughing, actually, though silently. And he was looking straight at me.**

**I turned to Sherlock, looking for an explanation, and saw his face go white as the ghost I’d thought he was not three hours ago. As though moving underwater, he turned to look at me, his eyes so wide they were ringed all ‘round in white. “Lestrade,” he said levelly, “don’t let Moran move.”**

**And then he was diving at me, for a second patting me down and then, with a snarl of frustration, tearing my jacket and jumper off me. The door to the club was still open and he hurled the whole lot out into the street. I stood there, bare chested, watching Sherlock’s own chest heave as he panted, his face covered in a sheen of sweat. Then I realised that Moran was fighting with Lestrade and the other men who held him, wrestling for control of the thing he held in his hands. I looked to Sherlock, who nodded at the inspector. Lestrade broke the man’s wrist without ceremony, and the harsh crack of bone was echoed outside by a soft popping sound that split the chill evening air. From the window I could see my jacket and jumper engulfed in a small ball of flame and smoke, and then all was still.**

**Lestrade approached me, holding out a small, sophisticated-looking device. “Dead man’s switch,” he said. “Must’ve dropped a bomb in your pocket when he wrestled you in the door. Another second, Sherlock, and…” He looked at Sherlock with that age-old mix of exasperation and affection that made me feel as though, after three long years, I’d finally come home.**

**“Boom,” Sherlock agreed, taking the device from him, turning it over in his hands, before turning to look at me. “Cold?” he asked, shrugging out of his overcoat, showing all the world that he was wrapped in one of Mary’s old evening gowns.**

**“This,” I said as he reached out to wrap me in it, “people are definitely going to talk about."**

**Sherlock threw back his head and laughed, swirling the coat over my shoulders and bending to rest his forehead against mine. It was so good to hear him laugh again that I almost didn’t see what I saw - Moran, broken wrist notwithstanding, wrenching free of the men holding him and twisting with his good arm to grab the gun strapped to Lestrade’s side.**

**And then, with the kind of clarity I’d known only at Sherlock’s side and in a combat zone, I realised how heavy one side of Sherlock’s coat was. The action around me seemed to slow as I dug into the pocket, coming up with my own army pistol. It fit into my hand like an old friend, and without thinking about it I aimed, steadying my arm against Sherlock’s shoulder, and shot Moran twice, once in the arm and once in the knee. He dropped the gun and was sprawled on the floor before anyone else had looked around, before the echoes of Sherlock’s laughter had died around us.**

**As the man spluttered and groaned, writhing on the floor, Sherlock stepped over to stand above him. He looked somehow taller than I remembered him, although he had exchanged Mary’s high heels for a pair of low black boots, and his face was as pale and gaunt as a much older man. His eyes flashed. He was dazzling.**

**“Well, Sebastian,” he said, so low and calm it sent a chill through my bones. He was so cold, so controlled, that had I been his enemy I’d have been cowering on the floor alongside the injured man. “I used to consider you the most dangerous man of my acquaintance.” His eyes flicked up to meet mine, and the ghost of a smile flitted over his lips. “That opinion might bear revision.”**

**“Right, right,” Lestrade grumbled, pushing between us and reaching down to slap handcuffs on the injured man, grimacing when he got blood on his hand. “Smith find us a stretcher for the second-most-dangerous man in London, will you?”**

**Lestrade turned and glared first at Sherlock, then at me. “You two, wait out there in the Maria. And while you’re waiting maybe you’d like to come up with a plausible explanation for my boss about where exactly this came from,” he held up my pistol in one gloved hand before dropping it into an evidence bag.**

**Sherlock’s face twisted into a grin and Lestrade rolled his eyed and groaned. Then, not bothering to look around to see if anyone was observing, he pulled Sherlock into a hug, clapping him roughly on the back. “Welcome back, lad,” he mumbled, and then he was away, off shouting directions to his team.**

**Sherlock led me out into the cold night, and we stood together side by side for awhile, watching the sunset fade away to be replaced by the flashing lights of police vehicles and listening to the excited buzz that always surrounds a crime scene. We kept to the shadows, observing without being observed. But I soon turned my gaze from the sights around me to the friend beside me, and found that he was staring, eyes wide as though desperate to take everything in, hungrily soaking up the sights, sounds, smells, the very essence of the once-ordinary street before us.**

**Soon enough he began speaking in that way I knew so well, laying out the facts of the matter as they appeared to him, as well as venturing one or two ideas that he prefaced as “mere speculation – for now.”**

**“I have no doubt that you’ve got it all right, Sherlock, or at least that you’ll get the whole truth soon enough.” I said when he finally fell quiet, looking up at him. “That was – _you_ were fantastic.” **

**Sherlock sighed, his wide-eyed expression melting into a smile of such serene satisfaction that I found myself grinning along with him, and as we stood pressed together from shoulder to knee, I felt him relax and lean slightly against me.**

**“The trial will come and go, and I will be vindicated or he will. Well – I will. But at any rate, it is done. All of this will pass, and Moriarty, Moran, none of them will trouble us any more, except in memory.”**

**He was quiet for a very long time, and I wanted desperately to know what he meant. If he would be leaving again, if he was planning to go back to the life he’d forged while he was dead, or if he was home for good. But I couldn’t bring myself to ask him, to break into the quiet, perfect moment. But finally he shook himself and took my arm, marching us toward the police car where Lestrade had told us to wait.**

**“I gave Mrs Hudson quite a thrill when I turned up at Baker Street yesterday,” he said conversationally.**

**“You’ve been back to Baker Street, she knows you’re alive?”**

**“Yes. I needed her help to get all my troops lined up for this evening. She is quite invaluable as a general. And as a landlady; she’s kept our old rooms just as we left them, not a book or bauble out of place.”**

**“I knew she hadn’t let out 221B again, I thought it was just…I didn’t realise she was holding it for you.”**

**“Neither did she.” Sherlock snorted fondly. “The things otherwise sensible people will do for the sake of sentiment. But it’s…good. More than good, it’s ideal. With Moran out of the way, and you and Mary safe and happy, a comfortable flat is all I need to go back into business.”**

**He opened the car door for me, and we stood there, grinning stupidly at each other. I didn’t know what to say, but Sherlock was eloquent as always. “And so it is that I find myself once again free to devote my time to all the little problems that I hope the good people of London will never tire of bringing to my door.”**


End file.
